At last long there was solid proof that humans had died in a real Noachian Deluge. That such an event had occurred was widely taken on faith by Christians, and the belief that world’s geology had been formed by the Flood was assented to by many naturalists, but in 1725 the Swiss naturalist Jacob Johann Scheuchzer believed that he had discovered a symbol so instantly recognizable that no one could doubt that the biblical catastrophe was real. It was what appeared to be a human skeleton, cleaved nearly in half but nonetheless preserved by the very floodwaters that had killed the sinner.

The skeleton had come from a limestone quarry in Oeningen, Germany. To Scheuchzer it has a distinctively human appearance.